Friend #43 - Zev
My uncle
My favorite romantic comedy is When Harry Met Sally. I watched the film for the first time about two years ago but have played it about half a dozen times as background noise while working on something. The plot line is magical. The predictability of knowing the two will end up together but never being sure exactly how. The emotional ending of the New Year’s Eve Pary where Harry runs to profess his love for Sally. But what happens after this party?
“Before I got married my view of love came from what I saw in movies,” my uncle, Zev, tells me.
I’ll confess that I’m just beginning to understand this concept. When I think of love, I now think of fidelity of longevity of knowing that someone will be there through the good and the bad.
In the context of friendship, I think of it as my friends who are there for me. Not the friends I enjoy speaking to the most or the ones I have the most in common with but the friends who are genuinely and simply there.
My uncle was 18 when I was born. As a child, I watched him navigate his 20s. My mom would pester him to get married or ask him about someone new he was seeing. “Now you can find something else to bug me about,” Zev told my mom during his wedding speech.
He’s been happily wed for nine years and has two children. In an effort to understand my own dating life, I often interrogate him on what his was—knowing that there is no formula.
Perhaps that is what bothers me the most, there are no rules in love. After the party ends, everyone navigates relationships differently. Everyone defines a relationship differently. Everyone finds their own unique happiness.
Zev traveled a lot throughout his 20s. The most interesting place he visited is Nepal. “Look up Annapurna,” he says as we sit for dinner as a family to celebrate my mom’s birthday.
When I pictured my 20s as a child, I envisioned myself finding love at 22 and living happily ever after. Who I’ve come to be would perhaps shock seven-year-old me and even surprises me now. I’ve lived in different cities, I have friends all over the world. I’ve lived, laughed, and cried. The love that I know I am looking for is one that needs to be built with the right person and I know that day will come.
“It could happen at any moment,” Zev says.
He shares that when he met his wife, she told him that he possessed a nonchalance that in many ways made him attractive. A ‘This is who I am, take it or leave it.’
I think that’s what we’re all striving toward. A comfort within ourselves that allows love with a partner to thrive. Still, I believe we can discover ourselves in the context of healthy relationships. A balance between reflection and action. Perhaps that is some sort of formula.
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
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